I Didn’t Know My Partner Was Abusive

It took me two years after the breakup to realize.

Photo by Sydney Sims on Unsplash

“You’ll never find someone who will be as patient with you as I’ve been.”

My partner flung these words at me just before we broke up, while he was clearly running out of patience. At the time, I heard it as a warning to be heeded. Now I see that it was a threat; there were four unspoken but implied words that actually came before that statement. He really meant to say:

“You can’t leave because you’ll never find someone who will be as patient with you as I’ve been.”

And of course I believed him. How could I not, when he was constantly telling me that I was an alcoholic, anti-social, friendless loser who had destroyed everything in her life but her career, and who knew how long it would take to destroy that too?

To be fair, he didn’t call me a loser — but everything else is verbatim. And to his credit, I am an alcoholic, but everything else on that list was a cheap shot and, frankly, untrue. When I was in the thick of it, at the rock-bottom of my alcoholism and on the verge of ending an engagement that never should have begun, I would have believed anything he told me. He had a steady job, a wide circle of friends, a loving family, and a variety of interesting hobbies; he had his life together, where mine by comparison looked to him like a jumbled mess.

I see now that just because my life looked different than his, that doesn’t mean it was wrong — it was just wrong for him. There are so many ways in which that relationship was doomed from the start. So many red flags that I overlooked. We weren’t wrong for ending the relationship, and he wasn’t wrong for wanting something different; he was wrong for wanting me to be different.

When we met, my life looked pretty similar to the way it does right now. I was self-employed, hosting esports events on a freelance basis and streaming on Twitch. My life didn’t have the structure of a 9–5 office job, I got a lot of work done in the evenings, and I traveled for gaming events a lot of weekends. I sometimes slept til 10 AM and didn’t go to bed until well after midnight. I’ve moved a lot for work, so my closest friends lived in San Diego, Seattle, New York, Dallas, and Huntsville, Alabama. I played games online with them, FaceTimed, and exchanged letters and gifts via snail mail. I’d see my parents and sister a couple times each month for dinner or coffee.

And at first, he liked all that — or he told me that he did. He seemed enthralled by the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope and liked that my life, by contrast to his, fit into this idea. He was excited by the carefree spirit and fuck-the-man attitude that I appeared to exude. But as we dated, he meticulously built a box for me, brick by brick, and tried to place me inside, taking it personally whenever I wouldn’t fit.

Despite all the things that initially seemed to make me attractive to him, he quickly began to wear away my self-confidence. One night, early on, we were discussing our differing lifestyles and he expressed his displeasure at mine.

“But aren’t you worried about the future? I mean, are you even putting away any money for retirement?”

And even though I hadn’t been particularly worried about the future up until that point, that’s when I started to be. The way he asked, not out of curiosity nor concern, but out of fear for the ways in which I was different, had a huge impact on the way I saw myself and my life. So, less than three months after meeting him, I decided to quit esports and gaming and take a more traditional job with regular hours and significantly less travel.

And I was miserable.

I got out of that job and back to the life I loved, but it still took almost three years of similar occurrences before we both threw in the towel and admitted it wasn’t working. And even for two years after that, I blamed myself for a great number of things. I know I wasn’t entirely blameless in our relationship, but I have come to terms with the fact that I didn’t deserve to be treated that way.

He was never unfaithful, he never physically hurt me, and he didn’t call me names — so it took a long time and a lot of self-reflection to realize that he had been emotionally abusive. He made me believe that all of our problems were entirely my fault; one day toward the end of things, during a state of the union discussion, he laid out all the ways in which I had disappointed him. When I countered with his own shortcomings as a person and a partner, he flat-out rejected them and told me I was wrong.

I hope he’s doing better now. I know I am.